The main changes in this build are fixes for some texturing bugs reported by users:

* Faces with multiple textures or complex textures were sometimes showing up as transparent in the Octane window.

* Textures from the previous scene sometimes appeared when a new scene was loaded.

If you have a V3 license, you will be able to try this build. As with all experimental and test releases, please do not use this build for production work, and please note that we still classify this as an experimental release. We cannot guarantee that scenes saved with this version will be compatible with future releases.

The 3.06+ release series represents a thorough redesign of the plugin's user interface. The plugin now uses a separate window of its own, similar to the standalone Octane Render application. You can open this window through the Octane button on the SketchUp toolbar, or from SketchUp's Extensions menu.

The Octane plugin window is built from a set of panels similar to the standalone app:

* The Scene Outliner (on the left in the default layout) shows an expandable list of all nodes in the Octane version of the scene. This panel also has tabs giving access to the LiveDB and the local database.

* The Render Viewport (top) shows the image rendered by Octane. This was originally a separate window in earlier versions of the plugin.

* The Node Graph Editor (bottom) depicts a "sandbox" that shows only the material nodes (and linker nodes connecting them to the geometry); the rest of the node graph (geometry, rendering options, etc) is hidden. You can manipulate the material nodes in the same way you would in the Octane standalone app.

* The Node Inspector (right) shows the full details of any selected node, and allows them to be edited by hand.

You can learn more about the new user interface from the manuals and tutorial videos for the Octane SketchUp plugin and the Octane Render standalone application:

* SketchUp 2016, 2017, or 2018 for Windows x64; SketchUp 2018 is recommended* Microsoft Windows 7, 8, 8.1, or 10 for x64* The plugin is not compatible with any x86 (32-bit) version of SketchUp or Windows

Software (Mac version):

* SketchUp 2017 or 2018 for MacOS; SketchUp 2018 is recommended* MacOS 10.11 (El Capitan), 10.12 (Sierra), 10.13 (High Sierra), or 10.14 (Mojave)* The plugin is not compatible with any version of MacOS earlier than 10.11

Hardware:

* 64-bit Intel or AMD CPU* One or more recent model Nvidia GPU cards* Nvidia drivers version 387 or later; CUDA 9.1 support is required* The plugin is not compatible with AMD or Intel GPUs

Installation

There are separate installers for the SketchUp 2016, 2017, and 2018 versions of the plugin. You can install more than one of these on the same computer; they are treated as separate applications. We recommend uninstalling all previous versions of the SketchUp plugin before installing the latest version.

Please note that stable and test releases will not be identified by any special version numbers. Because of potential compatibility issues if different builds of the Octane engine are run on the same system, we believe it is more important to keep plugin version numbers synchronised with the corresponding build of the standalone Octane application and the Octane SDK. If you are having problems, the first thing you should check is that you do not have different versions of other Octane products installed.

These changes were made in earlier 4.x releases of the plugin, and are still relevant in the latest release:

* Object visibility tracking has been greatly improved. Visible and invisible layers, and hidden and unhidden objects, will now be fully tracked in the Octane render window.

* The new Universal Material has been added to the default material options.

* Handling of the Octane workspace layout has been changed slightly. Loading a new scene that doesn't have a layout saved with it will now revert to the default layout, and there is a new menu option to reset the layout to the default.

These changes were made in earlier 3.x releases of the plugin, and are still relevant in the latest release:

* The new instance based textures in Octane are now supported. These can be used in conjunction with the third party Skatter plugin to create scattered objects with variable textures.

* There is a new Settings dialog, available from the Extensions menu in SketchUp (Extensions > Octane > Settings). This currently has only one setting, a drop-down list that allows you to select the default material type used when converting SketchUp materials to Octane. The available choices are Diffuse, Glossy, Metal, Specular, Toon, or Universal; Glossy is the default if you have not chosen one. Changing this setting does not affect anything in an existing Octane version of a scene; it only controls the choice of material type when new SketchUp materials are imported into Octane in the future.

* Environment settings are now automatically transferred from the Octane view of a scene to SketchUp. When you adjust the sun position in the Octane environment node, SketchUp's sun follows (you need to have shadows enabled in SketchUp to see this, of course). This feature has a couple of limitations: (1) SketchUp's lighting model is much simpler than Octane's, so there are many settings on the Octane side that are not copied to SketchUp simply because SketchUp has no way to reproduce them. (2) We don't yet support different lighting models on the Octane and SketchUp sides. This means that, if you set the Octane lighting to anything other than Daylight, you will see inconsistent behaviour as the plugin tries to reconcile the Octane and SketchUp versions of the scene. Full support for other lighting models will be added in a future upgrade; for the moment, we only fully support the Daylight model.

* The plugin is now available for Mac as well as Windows. The Mac version has all the same features as the current Windows build, and the two versions will be kept synchronised in future releases. Please note that, like the Windows version, the Mac plugin requires an Nvidia video card compatible with CUDA 9.1. Most recent production Macs have AMD or Intel GPUs; to use this plugin you will need an older Mac with an Nvidia card, a desktop Mac Pro that has been upgraded with an Nvidia card, or a system with an external GPU.

* There is now an option to "pause" the connection between SketchUp and Octane. When paused, changes to the SketchUp scene will not be copied to Octane; this allows you to make complex changes to the SketchUp scene without the Octane scene being updated for every step, and then update it all at once when you unpause. There are toolbar buttons for the Pause and Rebuild actions.

* When you add a new camera view in SketchUp, a corresponding render target node will be created in Octane. The camera position and render settings are tracked separately for each render target, and will be saved with the SketchUp model in your .SKP file. When switching cameras, the corresponding render target is selected in the scene outline.

* There are no longer separate menu options for converting a SketchUp material to an Octane one, or for creating a new Octane material from scratch. These are no longer necessary since the new GUI window provides equivalent functionality. Converting a material from SketchUp to Octane is not a separate operation now; it happens automatically as soon as the material is used.

* All information about Octane materials is now saved with the SketchUp scene in the .SKP file. Unlike earlier versions, all texture graphics are included in this; textures are no longer saved in a separate directory. The saved scene also records any changes you make to the material nodes through the node graph editor. This means that you can now transfer a scene file to another computer, or send it to another user, without losing the texture information. However, it also means that scene files containing Octane plugin data are necessarily larger (sometimes much larger) than they were as plain SketchUp scenes, since they now contain all of the image files needed to reconstruct the Octane textures.

* Like the Octane 3 standalone version, the SketchUp plugin uses the new single sign-on system. You still need to have purchased a license for the SketchUp plugin, but it will now be checked automatically when you log in using your Otoy account credentials; you no longer need to keep track of user IDs and passwords for individual licenses. The new authorization management window is a modal dialog where the user can sign out and sign in. It also informs the you under which name you are signed in and if that sign-in was in offline or online mode. When a user signs out, all of your licenses which were activated on this computer will be deactivated. This requires that all these licenses are currently not in use by other Octane processes; if that is not the case the sign out will fail.

* Because most rendered images are now stored in your computer's main RAM instead of your video card's RAM, all Octane 3+ applications, including the SketchUp plugin, will frequently use a good deal more memory than their Octane 2 equivalents, especially for high resolution renders. You should keep this in mind when upgrading.

* 3.03+ releases include experimental Pascal GPU support. Please note that we are still working on performance issues there.

* Support has been added for the Skatter plugin's Render Only mode.

Known Issues

We hope to fix these in a coming update:

* When the Octane window is closed and reopened, node positions in the node graph may unexpectedly change, and unconnected nodes may be lost. This is our next priority for fixing.

* The Mac installer is not signed yet. For the moment, if Finder gives you an error when you run the installer, you can override this and run it by right-clicking on the installer and selecting Open from the popup menu.

* Custom resolution in the material preview does not work.

* Once a texture has been copied from SketchUp to the Octane version of the scene, any changes made to either version of the material are not reflected in the other version. (This is a simplification applied to ensure the two versions of the material are handled correctly in this version of the plugin; we intend to add automatic transfer of changes from one to the other in future, where the different properties and behaviour of Octane and SketchUp materials allows it.)

The following are SketchUp bugs that we have no control over, although we will try to find a workaround if possible:

* Re-applying the same texture after an undo may fail to work.

* The toolbar buttons on the Mac plugin sometimes show incorrect pressed-vs-unpressed states.

Same bugs with materials and proxies as before.A workaround I used in v3.8 was to edit proxies in Standalone and use the "left click on proxy in SU >Octane Proxy >Update"But now you have to close/reopen SU file for this to work.

And some times the octane plug-in relink a lonely material inside "Octane Sandbox" (se picture below)

Here are a SU document for debugging (nb, I tried changing to a SU inches template to see if any effect).

The texture scaling issue is random. It happens on reopen and when assigning new materials.Images I assign inside "Nodegraph Editor" also get randomly linked with images from the temp folder at reopen.

NB: The only link we need after a texture are assigned in SU is the ability to change UV mapping!!!!And that settings and nodes created in "Nodegraph Editor/Sandbox" get saved and not randomly altered!!!

And when this is achieved > bring back the old functionality where you could left click a surface or material and regenerate it from octane material.